LITERARY CRITICISM



LITERARY CRITICISM

AP LITERATURE & COMPOSITION

Literary Criticism – a natural human response to literature; nothing more than discourse-spoken or written-about literature.

“almost every literary work is attended by a host of outside circumstances which, once we explore and expose them, suffuse it with additional meaning.”

Literary Theory – criticism that tries to formulate general principles rather than discuss specific texts.

Critical Approaches to Literature

Approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive; approaches can (and do) grow and develop from one another. Moreover, many critics mix methods to suit their needs and interests.

1. Formalist Criticism – paying special attention to the formal features of the text – the genre style, structure, imagery, symbolism, tone (especially when repeated or seen in patterns). Formalists believe that what gives a literary text its special status as art is how all of its elements work together to create the reader’s total experience.

• More interested in the HOW (form) of a work than the content (WHAT).

• Uses the technique of close reading – a careful step-by-step analysis and explication of a text, paying particular attention to literary devices and the patterns the devices establish.

• Insists that form and structure cannot be separated from the meaning.

• Focuses on the text itself to explain how it produces a complex effect on the reader.

• Assumes the autonomy of the work itself and the relatively unimportance of external considerations (e.g. author’s bio, political influences, and so forth).

• Motto: Trust the poem, not the poet.

2. Biographical Criticism – understanding that an author’s life can help readers more thoroughly comprehend the work; biographical information provides the practical assistance of underscoring subtle but important meanings.

• Uses knowledge of the author’s life to provide insight into the text.

• Looks at how real life can shape the meaning of a work.

• The reader, however, must use biographical interpretations cautiously.

• The life story can overwhelm and eventually distort the work. A savvy biographical critic always remembers to base an interpretation on what is in the text itself; biographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material.

3. Historical Criticism – seeks to understand a literary work by investigating the social, cultural, and intellectual context that produced it; a historical critic sees a literary work chiefly as a reflection of the author’s life and times or the life and times of the characters in the work.

• Recreates, as nearly as possible, the exact meaning and impact the work had on its original audience.

• Explores the possible ways in which the meaning of the text has changed over time.

• Sees the work as a historical artifact that can offer insight into the time period.

4. Psychological Criticism – exploring human behavior through wish fulfillment, sexuality, repression, dreams, and the unconscious.

Three approaches:

1. An investigation of the creative process of the artist; what is the nature of the literary genius, and how does it relate to normal mental functions?

2. A psychological study of a particular artist or subject’s motivations and behavior.

3. An analysis of fictional characters by trying to bring modern insights about human behavior into the study of how fictional people act.

• Associated with the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his followers.

• Examines the tension of the mind (e.g. Freud’s theory of the id-ego-superego).

• According to Freud, the artist knew the unconscious better than he did.

• Freud admitted that he himself had learned a great deal about psychology from studying literature (e.g. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dostoevsky).

• Some of Freud’s most influential writing was, in a broad sense, literary criticism.

• Psychological interpretation can afford many profound clues toward solving a work’s thematic and symbolic mysteries, but it cannot account for the beautiful symmetry of anything well-written; it works best when combined with another approach.

5. Mythological Criticism – combines the insights of anthropology, psychology, religion, history, and comparative literature.

• Explores the artist’s common humanity by tracing how the individual imagination uses myths and symbols common to different cultures and epochs.

• Archetype – a symbol, character, situation, or image that evokes a deep universal response. Usually an image that recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience as a whole. (e.g. life as a journey)

• Associated with Carl Jung (Freud’s student) and Joseph Campbell (Jung’s student).

• Jung believed that all individuals share a “collective unconscious,” a set of primal memories common to the human race, existing below each person’s conscious mind.

• Mythic characters appear in virtually every culture on every continent. Although myths take their specific shapes from the cultural environments in which they grow, myth is, in a general sense, universal.

• Closely related to the psychological approach because both are concerned with the motives underlying human behavior. Myths are collective and communal, binding a tribe or nation together in common psychological and spiritual activities.

6. Sociological Criticism – examines literature in the cultural, economic, and political context.

• “it is the work not simply of a person, but of an author fixed in time and space, answering a community”

• What cultural, economic or political values a particular text implicitly or explicitly promotes.

• Examines social groups, relationships, and values as they are manifested in literature.

• Illuminates political and economic dimensions of literature other approaches overlook.

7. Gender Criticism – examines how sexual identity influences the creation and reception of a literary work. Feminist criticism focuses on a concern for the perspective of women on life, intending to raise the consciousness about sexual exploitation, marginalization, and alienation.

• Believes an author’s gender influences the text consciously or unconsciously.

• Images of men and women in imaginative literature reflect or reject the social forces that have historically kept the sexes from achieving total equality.

• Believes that culture has been so completely dominated by men that literature is full of unexamined “male-produced” assumptions.

• Sees the very act of speaking – of having a language – as a focus for studying women writers, so often silenced in the past.

• Despite their diversity, feminist critics generally agree that their goals are to expose patriarchal premises and resulting prejudices, to promote discovery and reevaluation of literature by women, and to examine social, cultural, and psychosexual contexts of literature and literary criticism.

• Beyond feminist criticism – explores the impact of different sexual orientation on literary creation.

• A man’s movement has also emerged in response to feminist criticism.

8. Marxist Criticism – focuses on the ideological content of a work, its explicit and implicit assumptions and values about matters such as culture, race, class, and power.

• Based largely on the writings of Karl Marx.

• Directs attention to social matters.

• Believes in focusing on a writer in his or her original context.

• Aims at not only revealing and clarifying ideological issues but also correcting social injustices.

• A literary work is first viewed as a product of work (and hence of the realm of production and consumption – economics).

• Uses literature to describe the competing socioeconomic interests that too often advance capitalist interests such as money and power rather than socialist interests such as morality and justice. (e.g. exploitation of the masses)

• Argues that literature and literary criticism are essentially political because they either challenge or support economic oppression.

9. Deconstructionalist Criticism – rejects the traditional assumption that language can accurately represent reality. According to a Deconstructionlist, language is an unstable medium.

• Literary texts are made up of words that have no fixed, single meaning.

• Shows how the text can “deconstruct” or be broken down.

• Focuses on how language can achieve power.

• Supposed truths are at best provisional and at its worst contradictory

• Many times the critic is negative, but at his or her best can expose the inadequacy of some conventional criticism

10. Cultural Studies (Criticism) – does not offer a singular way to analyze literature. The mission of cultural studies is to identify both the overt and covert values reflected in a cultural practice. It is composed of elements of Marxism, new historicism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, studies of race and ethnicity, film theory, sociology, urban studies, public policy studies, popular culture studies, and postcolonial studies – fields that focus on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation.

Cultural studies approaches generally share four goals:

1. transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.

2. is politically engaged.

3. denies the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and popular culture.

4. analyzes not only the cultural work that is produced but also the means of production.

Source:

Kennedy, X.J. and Dana Gioia. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Sixth

Edition. New York: Harper, 1995.

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